In the years before you start regularly missing your periods and routinely having hot sweats, your body goes through any number of pre-menopause symptoms. Just as some women are crippled during their period and other women aren’t bothered by it at all, early menopause symptoms differ in type and severity from woman to woman. About 4% of women will have premature menopause
Pre-menopause symptoms can start as early as your 30s, especially if you’ve never had children or are being treated for a major illness like cancer. The length of your pre-menopause also differs from woman to woman. Some only have them for a couple of years – others as long as ten.
Call The Doctor If You Have These Symptoms
Although these pre-menopause symptoms are normal and usually harmless, sometimes they may also be warning signs about other health problems. These are especially alarming if you’ve never had them before.
Pre-menopause symptoms worthy of a doctor’s appointment include:
- ·.
Normal Symptoms
No, it’s not hot in here and yes, it is you. Hot flashes can happen anytime, even when you are sleeping. Your face turns red; you feel as if you’ve suddenly stepped into Atlanta in August and you sweat suddenly so much that it often saturates or stains your clothes. The first ones are alarming, but after a while you get used to their length and severity and you become like people who live next to a railroad – you stop noticing the trains going by after a while. If, however, you faint or the sweats give you insomnia or panic attacks, see your doctor.
Other symptoms include:
- ·(especially waking up a lot)
- ·.
Some women also get extremely heavy periods when they never have before, have tender, swollen breasts all of the time, and lose their sex drive. Some women feel overwhelmed and scared. Some women don’t have a darn thing happen to them.
Symptom Prevention
The two major things you can do to ease the severity of premature menopause symptoms is eat a healthy, balanced diet and exercise regularly. You can never get away from the dieting and the exercise anywhere, can you? You need to increase your uptake of calcium because the bones weaken as the body stops making hormones which help maintain bone health.
You also should cut down on caffeine, smoking, the sweetener aspartame and alcohol, which can aggravate all of these premature menopause symptoms. Avoid taking hormones because these may increase your chance of getting certain cancers.
Resources
The Cleveland Clinic: Menopause
MedicineNet.com: Premature Menopause
